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The Writer's Atonement Melinda Robb in Ian Mcewan's Atonement

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The Writer's Atonement Melinda Robb in Ian Mcewan's Atonement The Writer’s Atonement Melinda Robb In Ian McEwan’s Atonement , literature and the act of writing cannot be reduced to escapism since they are, rather, inescapable. Literature is seldom isolated from reality in this way, but frequently inserts itself into the world with what are often life-altering consequences. At the same time, although it is not un reality, literature possesses no absolute authority since it is always the product of, at minimum, two fallible minds: the writer’s and the reader’s. Writing, therefore, cannot be taken as objectively true since it is always filtered through perception, though, if this is the case, neither can experience. Briony Tallis writes first as a reader, in order to understand, and later in order to be understood by her readers. Even as Briony completes her life’s work, she cannot ensure the success of her atonement in life, nor does she write it into her story. Robbie and Cecilia are dead and cannot grant her absolution: There is no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all. 1 Briony is mistaken in her belief that the novelist cannot be judged, or that he occupies a position of omnipotence; actually it is the reader who must be equated with the divine. In childhood, Briony as interpreter (or reader) of events controls the situation around her; she is not a liar 2 but merely mis-reads the scenes she witnesses, a mis-reading that dominates three lives and impacts countless others. Briony’s analysis is not the result of mere fabrication but of misguided perception. She desires to be a writer but initially she is simply the recipient of images she does not understand: For her now it could no longer be fairy-tale castles and princesses, but the strangeness of the here and now, of what passed between people, the ordinary people that she knew, and what power one could have over the other, and how easy it was to get everything wrong. 3 The writer is divine only insofar as he has access to the “truth” of a story. However, if there is no ultimate truth outside of interpretation, then it is the reader who has power over the story’s implications and who must issue the final judgment. As a writer, Briony yearns to occupy a position of objectivity but is unable to do so; her stories still contain heroes and villains. Even her final work, the novel Atonement , MELINDA ROBB 2 insofar as it is her work, does not demonstrate an objective ground. Briony still depicts herself, along with Lola Quincey and Paul Marshall, as guilty of the crime 4 that inspires the novel. Her ideal, however, is a transcendence of reductive categorization of characters: But wasn’t she – that was, Briony the writer – supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery-tale ideas as good and evil. There must be some lofty, god-like place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. 5 In McEwan’s story, this transcendent position is occupied by the reader. Briony’s novel still attributes blame; it is still a form of self-flagellation. Briony portrays her own character as having undergone years of torturous guilt and attempts to atone that have culminated in frustration; she is unable to make a career of writing, renounces her upper- class roots to become a nurse who must witness horrific images daily, and is incapable of reconciling with her sister. Though she allows herself the liberty of re-imagining a better conclusion to Robbie and Cecilia’s romance, she does not allow herself to feel satisfied. Instead, she depicts these fictionalized lovers and traumatized by their experiences. Briony’s adult life is one of constant self-inflicted torture. In her final act of atonement, an elderly Briony Tallis leaves the novel to her posthumous readers who are then given the opportunity to experience these characters, in all of their nuances from an unbiased position. Whether Briony remains the villain or becomes an object of sympathy, she is now eligible for forgiveness, condemnation, or, ideally, for understanding from an objective observer. By giving her own story over to be judged, Briony places herself in a position similar to that previously occupied by Cecilia. Briony’s readers will interpret her story just as Briony has interpreted her sister’s, and they are liable to mis-read it just as wildly. In “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes argues that the reader is ultimately responsible for the creation of a story, and that the author is irrelevant. Barthes writes, There is […] someone who understands each word in its duplicity and who, in addition, hears the very deafness of the characters speaking in front of him – this someone being precisely the reader […] Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, pared, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. 6 He argues that, unlike the characters who occupy limited perspectives in a story, the reader exists outside of it and has access to a multiplicity of frames-of-reference. This is 3 THE WRITER’S ATONEMENT true in relation to the story and characters; the reader is able to view the story through the perspectives of multiple characters, and may interpret from it a wide range of meanings. Just as events in her childhood perplex Briony and lead her to incorrect conclusions, writing, for Barthes, does not supply the reader with one underlying truth but with a multiplicity of interpretive possibilities that may be held simultaneously. As a result, it becomes difficult for the reader to pass judgment since he occupies so many positions at once. If there is no definitive interpretation, then judgment has no legitimate value. Barthes writes, Literature (it would be better from now on to say writing ), by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law. 7 When Barthes abandons the notion of absolute truth in writing and in the world, he consequently does away with the notion of God, whose existence implies absolute truth in creation; the death of the author is paralleled by death of God. This indicates that the reader has access to endless interpretive possibilities relative to a story and, equally, that the interpreter does relative to live. It follows from this undermining of authority that the author has no control over the consequences that result from his work; his intentions become irrelevant. It is not only the absolute authority of the writer that is eliminated by this dubious approach to the notion of truth, but that of the characters as well; in “Rewritings in Ian McEwan’s Atonement ,” Richard Pedot argues that McEwan’s novel serves as a critique or “rewriting” of literary modernism. When Briony’s novel, the original rewriting, is rejected by the publishing company, she has employed a modernist, subjective style. 8 She has emulated Virginia Woolf and criticized the notion of plot and character. Pedot argues that Briony’s ultimate story is a rejection of this style, a move away from the terrain of [the author’s] morally equivocal self-centered fictions […] If “the only moral a narrative need have” (40) is to enter the separate minds of characters and value them equally, self-enclosedness is the very dereliction of duty that the author’s youthful narratives may be said to share with modernism. 9 For Pedot, McEwan’s novel is a rewriting or atonement for the crime of modernism: an over-valuation of the subject. Read in this manner, Briony’s novel fulfills the author’s ethical obligation of atoning for youthful literary selfishness. Her novel makes up for her crimes against literature but cannot repair the real-world damage she has caused, except insofar as it relays to its reader the value of empathy over selfish subjectivism – the MELINDA ROBB 4 lesson that Briony herself has learned. McEwan’s novel depicts this lesson when it describes how Briony comes to learn it, while the work itself exists as an exercise in understanding, by providing the reader with direct access to Briony’s mind. Thirteen-year-old Briony’s interpretations of the various sexual scenes she witnesses on that fateful summer day are objectively wrong. Robbie is not a maniac; he writes to Cecilia because he loves her. This is the truth underlying his note. When Briony witnesses his sexual encounter with Cecilia in the library, she incorrectly interprets it as an attack, an understanding that contains no truth. Furthermore, Robbie is absolutely not Lola’s rapist. These facts, once closed to interpretation, are simply mis understood by Briony. Barthes’ annihilation of absolute truth does no eliminate the possibility for factual error, and in these encounters Briony does not occupy the position of reader.
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